COMPATIBILITY TESTING

Find Your Perfect Match

Can genetic testing lead you to your soul mate? A new wave of dating services say yes!

Find Your Perfect MatchCan genetic testing lead you to your soul mate? A new wave of dating services say yes!

Kenji Toma

The news is in and it's excellent. "There's a very good chance," an e-mail informs me, "that your wife doesn't fantasize about or sleep with other men."

The conclusion is particularly delightful because the evidence was gathered not via long-range telephoto lenses or tapped phone lines but something even more credible: genetic testing. My wife and I had each brushed a couple of Q-tips across our inner cheeks, sent the magic swabs off to a lab in Oklahoma, and our respective DNA—actually, just a tiny but crucial portion of it, three gene pairs that are part of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC)—have been analyzed by a DNA matchmaking website. And now an e-mail from one of these dating services is telling me that we've been deemed exceptional for mating: Five of our six corresponding alleles (each of these gene pairs is made of two alleles) are different, which they claim means there's a real good chance that we "love each other's natural body fragrance," that we're "both very satisfied" with our sex life, and that we have a high probability of producing "the healthiest possible children."

Had we just met rather than having recently celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary (thank you), were we not the parents of three healthy kids, the information in this e-mail might have been of use. Mostly, it simply confirms things: I've always loved her smell, for instance. (Then again, I can't imagine having stayed for 14-plus years with someone whose smell I didn't love. Could you?) Beyond that, word of our genetic compatibility is mostly fodder for dinner-party conversation.

But what if you're unattached and looking? Particularly if you're a woman—the gender blessed, as one MHC-related study asserts, with an "exquisitely sensitive olfactory system that allows them to make choices based on small differences in... alleles"? Would it strike you as too pragmatic, too unromantic, to go through the painless, simple process of swabbing your cheek and having a swatch of your genes analyzed if it might—so long as there's a sizable pool of similar male adventurers—speed up the process of finding your perfect match? If it might increase the likelihood of finding a great-smelling guy—who also loves your smell—with whom you'd have especially hot sex, and with whom you might one day produce a healthy child or three, with a lower chance of miscarriage, wouldn't it be worth it? (The three gene pairs in question contribute mightily to our immune system; the greater the diversity of disease-recognizing genes in our offspring, presumably, the better for his or her health.) In our complex, stimuli-saturated culture, do those six little alleles of yours and those of some tall, dark (or short, fair) stranger really matter at all?